Empty Hands Music
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
After a 14-year career as an Emmy-winning reporter, Scott Klug upset a 32-year Democratic House member from Wisconsin in 1990. Despite winning four elections with an average of 63 percent of the vote, he stayed true to his term limit pledge and retired in January 1999.
But during his time in office, Klug says, he had the third most independent voting record of any member of Congress from Wisconsin in the last 50 years.
Klug now works at the law firm Foley & Lardner, where he is a public affairs director and co-chair of the firm’s federal public affairs practice. He represents a broad array of the firm’s clients in Washington and several state capitals. He is also able to draw on his time as a television reporter to help clients craft proactive media strategies, particularly when faced with crisis management challenges.
In 2013, he authored “The Alliance,” a mystery novel about religion and antiquities.
Klug has returned to the public eye to represent “Lost in the Middle” voices in a regular podcast he produces.
He is a resident of Madison, Wis., where he lives with his wife, Theresa Summers Klug. The couple has three children.
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I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Klug for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of his democracy reform work:
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Former President Donald Trump recently said Vice President Kamala Harris is mentally impaired.
Schmidt is a columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Ableism, the social prejudice and discrimination of people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior, is just plain wrong and it is also un-American.
At a recent campaign rally in Prairie du Chien, Wis., former President Donald Trump disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting she was mentally disabled and called her “a very dumb person.”
Trump told the crowd: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”
Maria Town, CEO and president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, gave a statement to The Washington Post. “Trump holds the ableist, false belief that if a person has a disability, they are less human and less worthy of dignity,” she said. “These perceptions are incorrect, and are harmful to people with disabilities.”
As a mother of a child who was born mentally disabled, just reading Trump’s statements brought tears to my eyes. Since the former president has a history of mocking people with disabilities, I was not surprised. But it broke my heart to read that the crowd responded in cheers.
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Trump insinuated that having a mental disability makes a person incapable of being a good steward. He couldn’t be more wrong.
Here is a list of the qualities and attributes that my daughter brings to the table and why, judging on character alone, she is more of a leader than Trump will ever be.
My daughter loves this country and thinks it is already exceptional. She is always the first to stand for the national anthem when we attend a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game and enthusiastically enjoys celebrating America during our patriotic holidays.
Hardly a day goes by when Trump doesn’t diminish America by calling it a “chaotic hellscape,” a failing nation or a nation in decline — and that only he can “Make America Great Again.” Trump called Americans who died in war “losers” and “suckers.”
My daughter admits when she has done something wrong and apologizes for it. She has never spoken a bad word about anyone. Her heart is filled with love and empathy. She cares about her community and spends her time volunteering.
Back in 2023 a jury found Trump liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll. A separate jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million to Carroll over defamatory remarks he made about her while he was president. He continues to make defamatory remarks against Carroll to this day.
My daughter follows the rules and has never broken the law.
Trump became the first former U.S. president convicted of felony crimes. He was found guilty of business fraud and is awaiting sentencing after the election. He remains under state and federal indictment for election interference in the 2020 election. Trump was also under federal indictment on classified documents charges in Florida until Trump-appointed Judge Eileen Cannon dismissed the case in July.
My daughter understands that if she has only one dollar, she can only spend one dollar. That said, she prefers to save her money.
Although Trump has never filed for personal bankruptcy, his businesses declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009. During his presidency, Trump added approximately $8 trillion to the national debt.
My daughter delivers cookies to our local firehouse every year on the anniversary of Sept. 11 as a way of saying thank you to our first responders.
Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted on Jan. 6, 2021. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died right after Jan. 6 and four law enforcement officers who worked at the Capitol that day died by suicide in the months that followed. The House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack report detailed that Trump remained inactive for 187 minutes before posting a video on Twitter telling his supporters that they should leave the Capital. The committee also found that it was Vice President Mike Pence who attempted to order National Guard troops to quell the violence.
To my knowledge, my daughter has not once lied.
The Washington Post Fact Checker clocked Trump making 30,573 false or misleading claims over the course of his four years in office.
Respect for individuals with intellectual disabilities can be bipartisan, as can the understanding that ableist language has no place in this country.
In early 2024, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) introduced the Words Matter Act, which would update the U.S. code by eliminating the words “mentally retarded” and replacing it with language that better respects the dignity of individuals with disabilities.
Casey said of the bill: “We have an obligation to uplift people with disabilities and ensure they are treated with dignity and respect.” Moran added. “Individuals with disabilities deserve to be respected and valued,”
Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, let us agree to not denigrate any Americans, especially those with intellectual or physical disabilities, or elect people who do.
Heavily Hispanic areas near Chicago are home to environmental racism.
Sharp is chief financial officer at Environmental Litigation Group, P.C., a law firm based in Birmingham, Ala., that assists individuals and communities injured by toxic exposure.
The predominantly Hispanic populations in Rosemont, Schiller Park and Bensenville, near Chicago, have long been exposed to toxic chemicals known as PFAS originating from the neighboring O'Hare Air Reserve Station, which was closed in 1999. The phenomenon of environmental racism is not new to Chicago. Sites and facilities hazardous to the environment and human health have been placed near communities predominantly populated by Hispanic and Black people in the city for years.
Environmental racism and injustice have a long history in the United States, and it stems from racial inequalities, discriminatory land-use policies, and spatial segregation. Polluting industrial sites, landfills, highways, airports, and military facilities are commonly established in the proximity of communities of color. A report published by Princeton University states that although African Americans make up 13,6 percent of the U.S. population, they are 75 percent more likely than white people to live in areas near facilities that produce noise, odor and traffic, and 68 percent live near coal-fired power plants. Another study has shown that African American and Hispanic communities have twice as many oil and gas wells in their neighborhoods than white communities.
Contamination of the environment and ecosystems with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), affecting more than 90 percent of Americans, has been declared a national crisis. However, PFAS exposure in communities of color is not well examined yet, and it is something we need to acknowledge and know more about.
In May 2023, Harvard University's School of Public Health published a groundbreaking study that focused on drinking water contamination by PFAS in certain communities of color. The researchers looked at the connection between the level of contamination and the proximity of PFAS pollution sites to the watersheds serving such communities. The scientists concluded that communities with higher rates of Black and Hispanic individuals are more likely to be exposed to higher levels of PFAS — between 10 percent and 108 percent, depending on the type of PFAS — than other communities.
PFAS are thousands of synthetic chemicals used in a wide range of products since the 1950s, such as firefighting foam, food packaging, heat-resistant and non-stick household products, water-repellent clothing, cosmetics and many more. They make their way into the soil, air, ground- and surface water. The highest levels of PFAS are found in drinking water sources.
One of the main issues with PFAS is that they are extraordinarily persistent and resistant. With time, they build up in the bodies of people who are regularly exposed to PFAS, primarily through drinking water, and cause adverse health conditions. The two most widespread types of PFAS — known as PFOA and PFOS — are carcinogenic and have been linked to breast, ovarian, prostate, thyroid, and kidney cancers.
The Environmental Protection Agency introduced its first-ever recommendation for the maximum contamination levels of the various types of PFAS in drinking water in March 2023. For PFOA and PFOS, the EPA established four parts per trillion, meaning there is no safe exposure level for these chemicals.
Rosemont, Schiller Park, and Bensenville villages are near Chicago's most prominent PFAS hot spot, O’Hare International Airport. In 2020, the PFOA and PFOS detected in the airport were 13,800 ppt from the extensive use of the PFAS-based firefighting foam, used since the 1960s to suppress fuel fires. PFAS originating from military installations contaminate private and public drinking water sources of communities living in their proximity, as in this case. In 2022, 45.8 percent of the people in Rosemont were Hispanic. In Schiller Park, the estimated percentage of the Hispanic population in 2023 was 32,6 percent, while in Bensenville, it was 47 percent. These numbers clearly show how environmental racism and PFAS contamination go hand in hand in the villages in question.
The PFAS problem adds to the long list of environmental injustices Chicago’s communities of color, who make up 67,3 percnet of the city’s residents, endure. The southeast and west sides of the city, where most people of color live, are the so-called “sacrifice zones." In those areas, polluted air and water, illegal dumping and inappropriate storage of hazardous waste put people's health and well-being at a higher risk, with more people having cancer, asthma, respiratory issues and cardiovascular diseases than in the "white neighborhoods."
Communities of color exposed to life-threatening PFAS are more likely to develop severe illnesses, even if PFAS pollution affects them to a similar extent as it does other groups. This is because they often have less access to medical care or safer drinking water alternatives, and their voices are often neglected.
The Environmental Justice Act of Illinois acknowledges that some segments of the population disproportionately suffer from environmental hazards because the state permitted some facilities to pollute. Acknowledgment is a critical first step, but meaningful policy change and action are urgently needed. Decades of irresponsible and unjust PFAS use threaten the health of already disadvantaged Hispanic communities around Chicago, and we still do not know enough about the level and dangers of it.
Environmental justice organizations based in Chicago have been successfully fighting against environmental racism. The PFAS contamination problem should be added to their agenda. More and more people are joining multidistrict lawsuits against manufacturers responsible for PFAS pollution, hoping to receive some financial support and relief from their suffering. This confirms how impairing exposure to these chemicals is.
Republicans, including Gerald Ford in 1976, held the White House on the occasion of each of America's milestone birthdays.
Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
An odd pattern has emerged in the history of presidential politics. Every time the United States celebrates a major birthday milestone, a Republican sits in the White House.
When America celebrated its golden jubilee in 1826, Democratic-Republican John Quincy Adams was enjoying his second year as the country’s chief executive. When the nation rejoiced that it had reached its centennial 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Ulysses S. Grant was our president. At America’s sesquicentennial in 1926, Calvin Coolidge occupied the White House. And during the bicentennial almost 50 years ago, Gerald Ford was completing his one and only term at the helm.
All Republicans. A bit surprising given the rough parity of Republican and Democratic presidents over the years.
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What is less surprising is the particular vision of America they celebrated on those significant anniversaries. It was an America dominated by a belief in Divine Providence, a conviction that the “Almighty God” has sanctified this exceptional nation and that the blessings endowed by the Creator — the blessings of liberty, of equality, of justice, of limited government and of a moral theology based on Christianity — will always resound. America’s “high adventure,” they said, is part holy ordination, part Exodus story.
The words of their July Fourth celebrations tell the story.
Adams experienced the quintessential bittersweet day on July 4, 1826. He rang in the 23rd birthday of his second son, John Adams II, on the very same day he mourned the death of his famous father. I think we can forgive J.Q. Adams for not delivering a July Fourth address that year.
Still, five years earlier, he trumpeted America’s birthday with a most memorable speech. His words presage a common theme among all Fourth of July presidents: “Five and forty years have passed away since this Declaration was issued by our fathers;” he remarked, “and here are we, fellow-citizens, assembled in the full enjoyment of its fruits, to bless the author of our being for the bounties of his providence, in casting our lot in this favored land; and, by the communion of soul in the reperusal and hearing of [the Declaration], to renew the genuine Holy Alliance of its principles, to recognise them as eternal truths, and to pledge ourselves, and bind our posterity, to a faithful and undeviating adherence to them.”
Half a century later, Grant spoke more to the point, even if less eloquently: “It seems fitting,” he proclaimed, “that on the occurrence of the hundredth anniversary of our existence as a nation a grateful acknowledgement should be made to Almighty God for the protection and the bounties which He has vouchsafed to our beloved country.”
Coolidge was over the top in his belief in Divine Providence. America’s prosperity, he insisted, owed its source to a wink from a Christian God. Consider just a sample of his sesquicentennial address at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
“[The Declaration of Independence] is the product of the spiritual insight of the people,” he announced. “Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity … will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the father who created [the Declaration]. We must not sink into pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, that alter fires before which they worshipped.”
Ford was a bit more subtle. His Fourth of July address happened in the shadow of the National Archives. “In our Archives and Libraries,” he began, “we find documents to transport us across centuries in time — back to Mount Sinai and the Sea of Galilee, to Runnymede, to the pitching cabin of the Mayflower, and to sweltering Philadelphia in [the] midsummer of 1776.”
Echoing the words of Jefferson, Ford continued: “All human beings have certain rights” and those rights “are a gift from God. … Let each of us, in this year of our bicentennial, join with those brave and far-sighted Americans of 1776. Let us do as they did, with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, that the future of this land we love may be ever brighter for our children and for generations of Americans yet to be born.”
All four Republican presidents described an America born from a sacred charter and forged by a God-fearing people. Their descriptions reflected the hegemony of a Christian nationalist birth story, one that was no doubt accurate throughout most of American history.
But America has changed. It has changed a lot. That same birth story has become less compelling, less uniting, less resonant. It does not speak to the majority of Americans anymore. First off, the country has seen a steady decline in religious affiliation over the past 50 years. The secularization of America has come mainly from a dip in Christian followers. In fact, this country is less Christian today than at any time in its history. And that has repercussions for the upcoming election and for America’s 250 birthday. Sending the message that all citizens of this extraordinarily pluralist nation should assimilate to a particularized and holy narrative of Christian orthodoxy might have triumphed in the past. It seems sadly anachronistic today.
With hindsight, the America described by the Fourth of July presidents was always incomplete. The U.S. president who celebrates America’s upcoming milestone birthday — the semiquincentennial — must remember that. We should too. As we gear up to vote in a few weeks, and as we consider which candidate might best capture America’s new heterogeneity on July 4, 2026, let us recall the words of America’s greatest political poet, Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Perhaps the single thing which may be required to others before toleration to them would be an oath that they would allow toleration to others.”
Volunteers collect litter on Capitol Lake in Baton Rouge, La.
Plata is communications manager for Weave: The Social Fabric Project.
The Aspen Institute’s Weave: The Social Fabric Project tackles the problem of broken trust that has left Americans divided, lonely and in social gridlock. Weave connects and invests in grassroots leaders stepping up to weave a new, inclusive social fabric where they live. This is the fourth in an ongoing series telling the stories of community weavers from across the country.
In 2020, Marie Constantin was walking her dog around Capitol Lake in Baton Rouge, a peaceful bit of nature near the Louisiana capitol, when she realized the shoreline was covered in trash. “I stood there and I was almost paralyzed because it was more litter than I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says.
She didn’t stay paralyzed for long. The next day, she grabbed a trash picker and began cleaning the shore. At an age when others retire, the 68-year-old woman kept going back every day, eight to 10 hours a day. “Sometimes I would go on a kayak to pick up litter and look for the outfalls, the place where the trash was flowing from,” says Constantin.
A professional photographer, she began sharing her progress on Facebook.
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Little by little, neighbors started showing up. When a storm hit and thousands of pounds of trash flowed in, undoing much of the work they had accomplished over that year, more folks showed up to help. She estimates that up to 200 people have come out.
“We've picked up 26 tons of litter and four tons of tires,” says Constantin. “Businesses gave their employees time to volunteer. We had federal judges come out, we had little children come out. We had all kinds of people.” In the process, they’ve built friendships and a sense of community.
After cleaning up, a group often hangs out and shares a meal. Constantin’s social media posts capture the spirit. ”There's one photo where we created a human chain and dragged the bags up the hill, and you get a sense of the camaraderie,” she says.
The group noticed much of the litter flowing to the lake was single-use items, like chip bags and drinking cups. They traced those to trash trucks that were spilling small litter into the streets, where it washed into storm drains that led to the lake. They petitioned, marched and contacted the media, forcing the company responsible for trash pickup to spend several million dollars upgrading its truck fleet.
Now, the group is petitioning the city to implement a stormwater management system, which Constantin knows is an uphill battle that might take years. To coordinate these efforts, Constantin founded the Louisiana Stormwater Coalition. Now that people are connected and realize they can create change, anything feels possible. And she says neighbors are starting new projects to strengthen their community.
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